AThe Ukraine war and social media dictate the topics of conversation on the playground in the Haidach district of Pforzheim. Twelve older men in dark anoraks stand in a circle. Children are playing football on the football field next to it. The older men came to Germany in the early 1990s – from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia or Russia. This afternoon they are moved by the news from Kyiv and – even more so – from Bietigheim in Baden. Because there an innkeeper refused to serve Russian or Russian-born guests. The men are outraged. “For Gorbachev I was a fascist, then I came to Germany, had to hump here, worked in the garbage disposal. I was always the Russian. Now I’m being insulted,” says the 67-year-old man, who came to Germany thirty years ago as a late repatriate.
“The Ukrainians bombed the Donbass with Turkish drones, nobody here wants to hear that. There are no Russian schools there. Putin doesn’t put up with that,” says a 63-year-old man from Kazakhstan who worked as a welder. “If Putin hadn’t done anything now, it would have been a disaster. The West Ukrainians are worse than the Germans. And the Americans sell the gas twice as much as the Russians,” says a 64-year-old man. He comes from Siberia and worked as a machine setter until he retired.
Putin’s propaganda about the allegedly corrupt regime in Kyiv, about the American masterminds of the war, has arrived in Pforzheim. Some of the statements here sound like a comment from the “Russia Today” channel. The 67-year-old man from the tire workshop is trembling with excitement, he steps into the middle of the gathering: “Now the sanctions are coming and your pockets are empty,” he pulls the pocket lining out of his pants, “you don’t know if you’re in the supermarket you can still pay for the food.” He didn’t come to Germany to go on vacation, he says. After a hard working life, he feels betrayed by politics. From the point of view of these men, Putin is more a victim than a warlord: “What are the Americans doing in Europe or in Georgia?” We are against the war. Do not send weapons to Ukraine, otherwise the Russians will perish.”
“All is not as we hear it now”
For many years, the people of Pforzheim called the district of Haidach “Little Moscow”. In 1969, the city had started building the satellite settlement on the Buckenberg in the south-east, with the intention of creating living space for workers in the jewelry and automotive industries. The city planners opted for a mixture of bungalows and high-rise buildings, after 1990 the settlement developed into a social hotspot after the influx of German-Russian settlers. Seventy percent of the approximately 10,000 residents of the district are Russian Germans.
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